


February: Glitterbomb Bees

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Twelve Verses [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bees, References to Depression, Revenge, bees being judgemental, bees doing laundry, don't open that buzzing envelope even if it says it's from your secret admirer, entrepreneurial revenge, entrepreneurial spirit, the trollish postal system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 19:58:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9673805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: Sollux gets rid of troublesome bees by making them someone else's problem. It’s surprisingly profitable, in a variety of ways.





	

*

You did not start out to create a spite-based entrepreneurial empire. You didn’t even _create_ something, you just sort of moved a few things around. You avenged yourself in a manner that some might consider humorous. Anyone could have done it. But no one else thought of it first, so it’s yours.

*

You saved caegars for perigees, spend your dreaming hours, (between dayterrors), dreaming of a real, live, warp speed catagrub-based system. You spent your waking hours in anticipation and work (legal and less so) in the service of achieving it. Then the delivery came just 14 minutes early and 13 minutes later you arrived to pick up your treasure, only to find that one of your neighbors had already stolen it, though they left you the box, the hateful jerk. The lobby had shitty decorations anyway. The Condesce’s poster looks much better as confetti.

You didn’t even set yourself out for revenge initially. You just felt… low. You just didn’t have the energy to go through that again, the hope and the work and the disappointment. All things fail, in the end. All things die, in the end. Your end is coming, has been, and it’s always just a matter of a few sweeps. You thought to amuse yourself in the interval, to build something, to socialize with frenemies, to push a few limits and at least stretch your potential a bit before they lopped off bits and locked you in a box.  Thwarted, the thin skim of your mood and endeavors flays off, leaving only the bones of the matter. You are Doomed.

But. The thing about bees? You can’t really ignore them. And you might have been trying to sleep the day away in your coon, for, well a week or two, (at least) but your hives were buzzing, and not in a good way. There was chaos in the air, and ultimately, you had to intervene. Sopor plops and all.

 _How do you feel about shipping out?_ You mused, less bitterly than you might have, still half in a fugue, looking at the cause of the disruption, several handfuls 1 of bees at odds with their hives. It’s an idle thought, but then it’s not. They find the idea quite agreeable, no matter how unknown the next stop might be. You find the looted shipping box, and they waggle their way in, contending, as they go, that hives are for losers2. You seal the box back up, carefully, it’s important to leave the original air holes and no room for suspicion. You drop the box off in the lobby and go back to coon, waking only for the screams.

The bees return, smug and elated.

 _Should have seen that sucker run._ One waggle-laughs.

 _Found your catagrub, boss_. Another jabs, and dances out the coordinates with an extra wiggle of contempt. _Lock’s not engaged. Not anymore._

*

You retrieve your catagrub system and immerse yourself subsequently.

But.

In the shrivelly sections of your dormant ambitions an idea blooms frightfully:

**_Send Your Enemies Bees_ **

It looks more impressive in Kanaya’s quirk. You pick an ironically terrible font used by this one wader who kept plastering the slice forums with drag racing pics. And it’s not like you can’t cover your tracks, or won’t, but another layer or two of plausible deniability is no bad thing. Using the latest seadwellers-are-crazy meme font means your posting could not only be put up by anyone, it could also just be one more joke.

(Among the things that you do not like to spread around: you likes fonts more than is acceptable as anything other than hipster troll shit. Most of the time, what is said is more important than how, excepting code of course, because then you have to open it up and either be judgmental, or, well, very quietly admiring. )

Business is good. Very good. And the bees keep coming back with reports on all sorts of things.

_This troll has a cache of mind honey but all their bees are dead of poison._

_This troll sells secondhand clothes with the signs still attached._

_This group of trolls is running a betting ring, but they don’t know either of the above._

There are secrets everywhere and they swarm too you.

They don’t want to be hive bees. They are _working_ bees. They are _commuting_ bees. They are _get the better of trolls and come back to brag about it_ bees. They are _corrupting the larvae_ bees, because so many of the young workers now wish to be _raiders_ and not mere _computational cogs_. You order expensive propolis and build mock ups of older systems and encourage your hives into a series of replenishment cycles, until, even when most of the raiding crews are out, there is never enough room in the main hives for the commuting raiders anyhow. Some distant night, when you were very small, BiclopsDad hung curtains, which have since been gathering dust. With sufficient bees, it is possible for drapery to fly, straight into your face, and then the laundering facilities, while you are sneezing. You stagger after the dusty buzzing mounds, only to find, once they complete a wash cycle, that they were indeed red and blue pattern. Huh. You don’t remember when they weren’t gray. One drying cycle and you return to your hive block, hang the curtains back up, and watch a mass of bees settle on them. They are now red, blue, and bee.

You survey your troops.

It’s good to be entrepreneurial.

*

1 It is inadvisable to measure bees by the handful.

2It is impossible to properly accent the exact implications of this particular insult. Imagine someone calling you a lusus’s grub, and simultaneously preparing to plaster you, your lusus, and hive with excrement and set all of you on fire. In trollish, it’s most exact translation is closer to “Eat shit and die, motherfucker.” Except trolls are never clear on which dialect of motherfucker they intend, considering most of them learn the term from frenemies and not their regional schoolfeedings.

**Author's Note:**

> (Does anyone remember how in Diana Wynne Jones’s _Dark Lord of Derkholm_ , the kids fulfill their demon-enforced contract for “leathery winged avians” by taunting the smug geese into harassing the tourist parties? I could only aspire to create bees with such presence.)


End file.
